Intentional Diversification of a Multi-institutional Community of Practice Network

Thursday 1:10 pm – 1:35 pm PT / 2:10 pm – 2:35 pm MT / 3:10 pm – 3:35 pm CT / 4:10 pm – 4:35 pm ET Online
Concurrent Session

Tracie Reding, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Kelly Gomez Johnson, University of Nebraska at Omaha

This presentation will highlight the process the COMunities for Mathematics Inquiry in Teaching Network (COMMIT) developed to promote various aspects of diversification in their second round of on-boarding regional COMMITs. This presentation is geared toward anyone interested in expanding and diversifying their current professional learning teams, whether they be comprised of single institutions or multiple institutions. COMMIT is a national network of regional Communities of Practice centered around integrating active learning into the undergraduate Mathematics classroom that receives funding through a NSF grant. Communities of Practice are important for pedagogical change to be accepted and implemented with fidelity (Austin, 2011; Gehrke & Kezar, 2016). This presentation will describe how COMMIT national leaders identified a need to increase various forms of diversity, at the individual and institutional level, of the regional COMMITs with which they work to develop an ongoing evaluation cycle. The cycle consists of the following: development of a process to clarify their current demographic status, identify gaps they needed to address, development of application instruments, expansion of their recruitment efforts, and data-based decisions for selecting new regional COMMITs. This presentation also highlights how the national network is using Social Network Analysis (SNA) to longitudinally measure the personal and institutional makeup of individuals that interact with one another both intra- and inter-regionally to determine the amount of homophily present among the network members. This information will then be used to identify possible interventions the national COMMIT leadership team can use to help increase the diversity of the interactions themselves. The format of this session will be a 15 minute overview of the project including 10 minutes of Q and A and discussion specifically aimed at how this process might be integrated for different contexts.